A rock mass is a material quite different from other structural materials used in civil engineering. It is heterogeneous and quite often discontinuous, but is one of the materials in the earth's crust, which is most used in man's construction. Ideally, a rock mass is composed of a system of rock blocks and fragments separated by discontinuities forming a material in which all elements behave in...

Today visitors often approach the massive pyramids, temples, and obelisks of the ancient Egyptians with wonder and disbelief. The huge blocks of stone used to create these architectural masterpieces were quarried and moved without the aid of modern technologies, and it is diffi cult for us to imagine how such feats of engineering could be accomplished without the aid of cranes, bulldozers, truc...

Membrane-based separation technology has attracted great interest in many separation fields due to its advantages of easy-operation, energy-efficiency, easy scale-up, and environmental friendliness. The development of novel membrane materials and membrane structures is an urgent demand to promote membrane-based separation technology. Graphene oxide (GO), as an emerging star nano-building materi...

Both theoretical and experimental results on evaluating hidden water in building materials are reported to compare features of optical and microwave heating. Experiments have been performed on a 2 cm-thick reference sample made of gypsum pasteboard which contained voids filled with foamed polyurethane. The obtained results are compared to illustrate that advantages of microwave moisture detecti...

Gypsum wallboard is a popular building material, but is also very frequently overgrown by Stachybotrys chartarum after severe and/or undetected water damage. The purpose of this study was to determine whether Stachybotrys and other fungi frequently isolated from wet gypsum wallboard are already present in the panels directly from the factory. Surface-disinfected gypsum disks were wetted with st...

Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) market is under developing stage with a relatively low number of installations worldwide. However, integrating photovoltaic technology into buildings is straight forward as no additional space is required and building materials are simply replaced by PV modules. Although BIPV is considered a promising technology, especially where land for large-scale PV p...

Based on a framework proposed by Battese and Coelli (1995), we estimated the stochastic frontier production function for four Chinese industries: building materials, chemicals, machinery and textiles during 1990–1994. The type of technological change is tested and total factor productivity (TFP) growth is calculated for each industry. We found no evidence of technological change in the building...

Extended Abstract Thermal non-destructive testing is more and more applied even in the field of cultural heritage conservation. The main reason is the capability of inspecting large surfaces without any contact or damage. A large number of testing procedures and processing algorithms allows reaching reliable results both in laboratory or in situ. Well established or innovative techniques are ba...